"All well?" asked Dagneau, when he finished.
"I suppose so," Humphrey answered. "Westgate was in great form to-night—he was taking down at the rate of a hundred and twenty words a minute...." He rose and stretched himself. "Will you pay the late call at the newspaper offices? I'll be at Constans in case anything happens."
Out again into the bright glamour of the Boulevards to Constans at the corner of the Place de l'Opera, in the shadow of the opera-house, to meet the other correspondents, and wait on the events of Europe, and drink brandy and soda or the light lager-beer that was sold at Constans.
It was a place where most of the Paris correspondents gathered, and, sometimes, the "Special Correspondents" came also. They were lofty people, who had long since left the routine of Fleet Street; the princes of journalism, who passed through Paris on their way to St Petersburg, to Madrid—to any part of Europe or the world where there was unrest; war correspondents, and special commissioners; men who had letters of introduction from diplomat to diplomat, who talked with kings and chancellors, and interviewed sultans. They flitted through Paris whenever any big news happened, in twos and threes, only staying for a few hours at Constans to meet friends, and then on again by the midnight expresses....
They were a jolly lot of fellows who met in those days at Constans: O'Malley of The Sentinel, the fair-haired scholar who spoke of style in writing, and could speak French with an Irish accent and knew how to ask the waiter to "Apporthez des p'hommes de therrey"; Punter, who represented the Kelmscotts' papers, talked French politics late into the night, and wore a monocle that never dropped from his eye—not even in those exciting moments when Michael, his coal-black eyes and hair betraying his ancestry, crossed his path in argument.
At midnight Dagneau came in with word from the outside world. All was quiet. So Humphrey went back to the hotel in the Rue d'Antin, where he rented a room on the fifth floor by the month for eighty francs, including the morning roll and bowl of coffee. He wrote his letter to Elizabeth: he wanted her to come to Paris and share his life with him.
II
He wanted her very much to share in the delight of those days. It was all so new and beautiful to him, so different from London. He went about the city, sometimes alone, sometimes with Dagneau for a companion, to the Louvre, where the Venus de Milo filled him with awe and wonder, or to the Luxembourg, with its statuary set among the green trees. In the afternoons, when he had any spare time, he would take a book and read in the Tuileries, or on one of the seats in the Champs Elysées, where the fat Norman and Breton nurses, with their broad coloured ribbons floating from their coifs, wheeled perambulators up and down, or took the children to the Punch and Judy shows. And on Sundays in the season, there were the races at Longchamps, with a drive homewards in the cool of the evening, through the Bois, where his cab was one of a long line of vehicles making a moving pageant of the human comedy, with laughing bourgeois families riding five and six in a cab, and aristocracy and opulent beauty, artificial and real, rolling by in victorias and electric broughams.